birthday paradox

This is a discussion on birthday paradox within the A Brief History of Cprogramming.com forums, part of the Community Boards category; I am back because of an interesting thing called Birthday Paradox
Let's see how many of us share a common ...

Well, it doesn't help if a person with a matching birthday deliberately doesn't post theirs

That's the beauty of these probability theories; they explain nothing because they can't be disproven. Only proven. That is, they are true because that's just the nature of probabilities.

Or better yet, for every set of results that disprove the theory, one can always argue a bigger set can prove it.

I'm not sure why we should waste time on it
The exact same theory can immediately be applied to people's height, weight, cars with the same two initial letters in their license plates, poking my nose at the same time as someone else...

That's the beauty of these probability theories; they explain nothing because they can't be disproven. Only proven. That is, they are true because that's just the nature of probabilities.

I wouldn't say that the likelihood of an event occuring (even if in real world demonstration it is very unlikely because only a subset of humanity will ever produce an evenly distributed sample) makes the statement any less of a fact. You could simulate a number of assumptions by computer:

But it certainly has applications. The birthday paradox shows that even if the number of bins is much greater than the number of items, the probability that two items will randomly be put into the same bin is still very high. The lesson to be learned in relation to computer science is that efficient handling of the bins containing lots of items is always necessary.